What I'll be reading in the last third of 2024 (hopefully)
The best laid plans of mice and men, etc etc...
Each year, I ambitiously set myself a reading challenge, and each year, I deviate from it. In fact, this year I have several challenges. I was going to read 25 randomly selected backlist titles from my TBR. I was going to read everything I bought last year. I was going to read 50% of everything I bought THIS year. I was going to read one hundred books. (And for that last one, at least, I still might. The year is not over yet.)
But the fact remains that I love books and I love reading, and in this final third of the year there are a number of books coming out, or that have just recently come out that I am drawn to reading and hope to get to soon. I felt like telling you about them, so here are a few words on each.
I have selected ten that I have yet to read. All blurbs have been sourced from publisher websites, which are linked in the titles if you're inclined to find out more.
1. Jasper Cliff by Josh Kemp (fellow Fogarty Literary Awards 2023 shortlistee, who I will be in conversation with on September 19th. See the events tab for details if you'd like to come along.)
When Toby Bowman vanishes, his brother Lachlan retraces a road trip to the last place Toby phoned from – a remote northern town called Jasper Cliff. There, Lachlan finds himself marooned at the dying town’s pub, and soon learns that his brother is just one of many to have gone missing in recent years. Like Toby, his brother becomes obsessed with finding the Rift, a deep hole in a ravine somewhere in the hills. But what will Lachlan learn, and what will he see, if he stares into the Rift, too?
2. A Wreck of Seabirds by Karleah Olson (also a fellow Fogarty Literary Awards 2023 shortlistee)
When Briony first meets Ren, he is standing in the freezing sea at the edge of their tiny town.
Ren hasn’t been home for a decade but has returned to be with his dying father.
Briony won’t leave, hoping that Sarah, her missing sister, will one day reappear.
But Sarah and her friend Aria have been stranded on a desolate island far off the coast. The longer they’re trapped there, the less alone they seem.
How many secrets in this town have been swallowed by the brooding sea?
3. The Burrow by Melanie Cheng
Amy, Jin and Lucie are leading isolated lives in their partially renovated, inner city home. They are not happy, but they are also terrified of change. When they buy a pet rabbit for Lucie, and then Amy’s mother, Pauline, comes to stay, the family is forced to confront long-buried secrets. Will opening their hearts to the rabbit help them to heal or only invite further tragedy?
It’s 1536 and the Queen has been beheaded.
Lady Grace Fairfax, witch, knows that something foul is at play – that someone had betrayed Anne Boleyn and her coven.
Wild with the loss of their leader – and her lover, a secret that if spilled could spell Grace’s own end – she will do anything in her power to track down the traitor.
But there’s more at stake than revenge: it was one of their own, a witch, that betrayed them, and Grace isn’t the only one looking for her. King Henry VIII has sent witchfinders after them, and they’re organized like they’ve never been before under his new advisor, the impassioned Sir Ambrose Fulke, a cold man blinded by his faith. His cruel reign could mean the end of witchkind itself.
If Grace wants to find her revenge and live, she will have to do more than disappear.
She will have to be reborn.
5. The Golden Thread by Tea Cooper
Maitland, 1889
When nineteen-year-old Constance Montague wakes one Wednesday she expects the day to unfold like any other. Breakfast with her grandmother Nell and her mother Faith, a meeting in Maitland with the ladies of the Benevolent Society, perhaps a gentle stroll along the banks of the Hunter River. But this Wednesday is different. Nell has vanished.
Concerned, Connie determines to track Nell down and follows a lead to Old Government House in Parramatta, now a guest house. There, to her astonishment she finds her grandmother holding court.
When Nell introduces her as her companion to a varied cast of colourful guests, including a frail but observant old lady, a travelling salesmen, a bearded lothario, a clever articled clerk, a lively seamstress and an enigmatic housekeeper who is connected with Nell's past, Connie begins to realise that her grandmother is not who she seems. Nell is looking for something and following a thread stitched long ago, a thread that leads from some missing gold, to a damask dress and the attic of Government House. As the story unravels so do the secrets of the past, secrets that surface into the present to threaten not just Nell, but Connie too.
6. The Venice Hotel by Tess Woods (I'll be in conversation with this lovely human on October 30th, see the events tab for more!)
When the lives of four very different women become entangled in a boutique Venice hotel, dark secrets unravel and not everyone who checked into the hotel will check out again.
Signora Loretta Bianchi, the world famous cook at Venice’s Hotel Il Cuore, is forced to choose between once-in-a-lifetime passion and her devoted husband.
Sophie, on assignment in Venice as a food writer, finds a lot more than Signora Bianchi’s secret recipes to love, but what is the charming Rocco hiding?
Law graduate Elena is sinking just like the endangered city she’s returned home to, and she’ll stop at nothing to be free from her marriage.
Grandmother Gayle’s dream Venetian holiday turns sinister as she finds herself embroiled in a life or death escape.
7. Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson
Welcome to Rook Hall.
The stage is set. The players are ready. By night’s end, a murderer will be revealed.
Ex-detective Jackson Brodie is staving off a bad case of midlife malaise when he is called to a sleepy Yorkshire town, and the seemingly tedious matter of a stolen painting. But one theft leads to another, including the disappearance of a valuable Turner from Burton Makepeace, home to Lady Milton and her family. Once a magnificent country house, Burton Makepeace has now partially been converted into a hotel, hosting Murder Mystery weekends.
As paying guests, a vicar, an ex-army officer, impecunious aristocrats, and old friends converge, we are treated a fiendishly clever mystery; one that pays homage to the masters of the genre—from Agatha Christie to Dorothy Sayers.
8. Swordcrossed by Freya Marske
Mattinesh Jay, heir to his family’s struggling business, needs his arranged marriage to go off without a hitch. But if he’s to successfully restore his house’s fortunes, Matti must first hire a swordsman to defend him against any sword-challenges at the altar. Unfortunately, the only duellist he can afford is part-time con artist and full-time charming menace Luca Piere.
All Luca wants to do is make some easy money and forget the crime he committed in his home town. He didn’t plan on being blackmailed into giving sword lessons to a chronically responsible – and inconveniently handsome – wool-merchant like Matti.
However, neither Matti’s business troubles nor Luca himself are quite what they seem. As secrets threaten to drive a blade through their growing alliance, both Matti and Luca will have to answer the question: how many lies are you prepared to strip away when the truth could mean losing everything you want?
The motherless child of an English priest living in ninth-century Mainz, Agnes is a wild and brilliant girl with a deep, visceral love of God. At eighteen, to avoid a future as a wife or nun, Agnes enlists the help of a lovesick Benedictine monk to disguise herself as a man and devote her life to the study she is denied as a woman.
So begins the life of John the Englishman: a matchless scholar and scribe of the revered Fulda monastery, then a charismatic heretic in an Athens commune and, by her middle years, a celebrated teacher in Rome. There, Agnes (as John) dazzles the Church hierarchy with her knowledge and wisdom and finds herself at the heart of political intrigue in a city where gossip is a powerful—and deadly—currency.
And when the only person who knows her identity arrives in Rome, she will risk everything to once again feel what it is to be known—and loved.
10. Matia by Emily Tsokos Purtill
Sia is a young Greek woman who has emigrated from Greece to Perth, Western Australia in 1945 for a better life. She carries with her four prophecies and four pieces of protective jewellery, matia, one for herself, her daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter. With a dooming prophecy hanging over each woman’s head will their lives unfold as they want or are they chained to the fate that’s been destined for them?
Over four generations and three continents, linking back and forth over 125 years from Greece to Perth to New York and back to Greece, Emily Tsokos Purtill has weaved a story that is utterly captivating and deeply moving.
What books are you excited about for the last third of the year? I'd love to hear about them.